ADL calls on conservatives to keep Nazi analogies out of gun debate

WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Anti-Defamation League called on conservatives to keep Nazi analogies out of the gun control debate.

"The idea that supporters of gun control are doing something akin to what Hitler’s Germany did to strip citizens of guns in the run-up to the Second World War is historically inaccurate and offensive, especially to Holocaust survivors and their families," Abraham Foxman, ADL’s national director, said Thursday in a statement.

The statement cited the proliferation of such arguments among gun control opponents in the wake of calls for greater gun controls after last month’s massacre of first graders in Connecticut by a lone gunman.

The Drudge Report headlined the White House’s announcement of such proposals with mug shots of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin and an array of conservative pundits have claimed that the Holocaust would not have been inevitable had Jews been able to bear arms.

The instances in which Jews managed to obtain arms, as they did in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, were symbolically important but would not have headed off the Nazi machine, the ADL said.

"Gun control did not cause the Holocaust," it said. "Nazism and anti-Semitism did."